Last week and over this weekend, there have been a few unforeseen events, which is why there’s no update today. There won’t be an update until Friday, December 14 as I need to head out to Trinidad for a bit to support my family grieving in their time of need.

I’m going to try and do more streaming and youtube stuff in general because that’s what the cool kids are doing. It’s mostly just going to be vids of me doing comic pages so if you’re curious as to how those are made, this might be relevant to your interests. Here’s a condensed video from a twitch stream I did last week.

After much deliberation, I’ve decided to give Patreon a second chance. Hopefully they won’t do anything as stupid as they did before and if they do, we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it. Sadly, as of lately, I’ve had to cut back on a lot of comic and personal art for work/workload/financial reasons. I intend on always having the comic be free to read and hopefully with support on Patreon, Ko-fi and my Art Shop, I’ll be able to get back to doing more comic pages a week, plus being able to pursue more artistic projects in general.

I decided to expand this new Patreon incarnation to encompass ALL my art stuff, as opposed to just being strictly Buddy and Friend-related. While my comics are my life blood, I also realize that there are other people who aren’t particularly interested in my comics but love my other non-comic artwork.

It’s with a heavy heart that I say The Misadventures of Buddy and Friend is going on an indefinite hiatus.

The truth is, I’m not getting any younger and I need to focus my efforts on finding financial stability. It’s been almost five years and I’d hoped to be able to do a Kickstarter for Buddy and Friend sometime at the end of this year. Sadly, readership has always been low, even with advertising and the comic has never gained any momentum over the years. I’m getting to the point where I have to cut out doing the things I love because loving the craft itself isn’t enough to get by.

In fact, every month, I’m losing $30 just to keep this comic running. My domain name is expiring in October and after that, the site will be no more. I’m transitioning he comic to Smackjeeves (because it’s free), which can be found here: http://www.smackjeeves.com/comicprofile.php?id=167952

To all of you who joined me throughout this adventure, I thank you.

If anyone is interested in printed copies of all 10 chapters, leave a comment below and let me know. If there’s somehow enough of a demand, I’ll make it happen.

Today’s comic will be up either later tonight or tomorrow morning. It’s been a busy week, as I’ve been remodelling my workspace since Monday of last week. Things are set up for the most part, so there should be no further craziness.

So you may have noticed that today’s comic is just the lineart. You drop to your knees and yell to the heavens “Why would you do this to me!!??” Or probably not.

I’ve spent a good portion of this year trying to do a life/career overhaul and figuring how to best do it. To say it’s been frustrating is an understatement. I won’t get into specific boring details of my life, but I’ve been wanting to work on bigger, fancier projects and change my work schedule in order to be able to handle said projects while still being able to sleep at some point. I’ve already adjusted my day job side of things, it’s just the comics bit that needed to be sorted out to figure out how to use my time more efficiently.

For the sake of transparency, I’ll say it right now: I’m cheating on Buddy and Friend with a much larger comic project. A behemoth of sorts.

That doesn’t mean that I love this comic any less than I did before. It just means that I want to work on something I’ve dreamed of working on and spent lots of time planning behind the scenes for years and years. And since I can’t have cake, ice cream, pizza and fillet mignon all at the same time, a compromise needs to be made. It was either stop Buddy and Friend completely to work on this other thing or keep the story going, but spend less time on pages.

I really want to keep the story going as we’re more than halfway through and I’ve got lots of great things planned for it. I don’t want to say “hey I’m going on hiatus” and then never return because that’s a terrible thing to do and a slap in the face to the people who have been keeping up thus far. So the story goes on, but the pages will just be black and white. When the whole thing is finished, I’m going to go back and do the colors – perhaps in a giant printed graphic novel version or just sneakily reuploading pages as time goes on.

What does this mean for the Patreon account? I’m closing it and will eventually re-open it for other comic project. I’ll give more info on that project when I start it up, if anyone’s interested. It’s set to launch in October. The Patreon will be launched sometime in 2017 when I have enough material for people to decide if they want to throw money at it.

To those who supported Buddy and Friend all these years, whether it was just reading the comic and leaving silly comments or supporting financially, I humbly thank you and silently wonder what I ever did to deserve such wonderful people <3
Over and out,
Hobo